KAFKA SINGS.(Kafka's Trial)(Opera Review)

The Danish composer Poul Ruders is one of contemporary music's free agents--a lover of sweet melodies with a yen for dark chords, a comedian with a flair for apocalypse. His previous opera, "The Handmaid's Tale," made sonic thunder out of Margaret Atwood's novel of a dystopian America ruled by Christian fundamentalists. His major orchestral pieces--"Thus Saw Saint John," the "Solar Trilogy," a First Symphony subtitled "Rejoicing from the Heavens, Grieving Unto Death"--unfold hypnotically wayward narratives that reel from antic joy to frozen despair. (There are excellent recordings on the Bridge and Da Capo labels.) Ruders has a special knack for reinventing familiar tonal harmonies and styles; he uses them sometimes to mourn lost worlds, sometimes to suggest otherworldly innocence, sometimes to convey the banality of evil. All these devices are hurled at the audience in his latest work, "Kafka's Trial," which had its premiere on March 12th at the Royal Danish Theatre.

Composers are mysteriously drawn to "The Trial," Kafka's tale of a bank clerk randomly hounded by the Law. Perhaps, like poor Joseph K., they feel persecuted for no reason. Gottfried von Einem produced a straightforward, solemn adaptation in 1953. A decade later, Gunther Schuller, in "The Visitation," boldly transposed the action to black America. Ruders, in tune with modern times, makes the story all about sex and guilt. The libretto, by Paul Bentley, blends scenes from Kafka's life with scenes from the novel. The plot is framed by the author's crazed epistolary engagement to Felice Bauer, who, in July, 1914, convened a family tribunal in a Berlin hotel room to confront her fiance with his neuroses. In the wake of that fiasco, Kafka wrote "The Trial." Bentley believes that Kafka considered himself guilty of misleading Bauer, and that the killing of Joseph K. at the end of the novel is a form of self-criticism. Kafka scholars may not buy that theory, but there's no harm in rewriting history if it makes for good theatre.

Alas, it doesn't. Ruders has said in interviews that he wanted to write a Kafka comedy, or, rather, a comic nightmare. The problem is that the material of both the novel and the life is, at best, morbidly amusing, and Ruders can't make it funny by force. The score has too many grotesque, wheezing episodes, too much infernal-machine music. The parodic touches are stale: klezmer references in the Kafka sections (the only sign of the writer's Jewishness), a groaningly obvious quotation from "Don Giovanni" ("Joseph K.! Joseph K.!," a la the Commendatore). Kafka's air of gnomic mystery, his Hebraic awe before the inexpressible, fades away. The climax of the novel is the chapter "In the Cathedral," where Joseph K. glimpses fate in all its hostile majesty. Ruders ordinarily thrives on gothic atmosphere--he once made a bone-chilling setting of Poe's "The City in the Sea"--but his cathedral scene feels strangely attenuated, as if he were afraid of losing comic momentum. The music acquires the right dark magic only at the end, when Felice confronts Kafka. Here, finally, is urgent word-setting over pungent chords, such as Ruders supplied throughout "The Handmaid's Tale." (Both Ruders operas, by the way, can be performed in English.)

I hesitate to render a final judgment on "Kafka's Trial," because the opera was hobbled by a spectacularly stupid production, which erased the distinction between real life and fiction and buried all the characters in an onslaught of puerile sexual imagery. Both Kafka and Joseph K. became idiots of id, desperate to try out every imaginable sexual act--anal, oral, you name it--with every woman who sauntered past. Watching it was like being trapped at a really gross Eurotrash orgy. There were also four Kafka doppelgangers wandering about the stage; at one point I thought they were about to get it on with each other, which might at least have brought us closer to Kafka's real sexual issues. Johnny van Hal soldiered bravely through the unsympathetic title role(s), but the standout in the cast was Gisela Stille, lending a warm, rich soprano to Felice.

The premiere took place at the Royal ...